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“If the police are utilizing these conversations, then the issue is, where does it stop?” he said. Libertarians consistently make slippery-slope arguments when

“If the police are utilizing these conversations, then the issue is, where does it stop?” he said. Libertarians consistently make slippery-slope arguments when most everybody else is just happy that some immediate problem is solved. This line of debate is freaking getting old, and I'm the first person to do it. The problem is that it always is a slippery slope. No bullshit. Changes take place over years or decades, so there's no single time you can raise an alarm. Right now it's gunshots. Next it will be car sounds -- estimating speeders and the conditions for traffic accidents. Then somebody will work out screaming. Then, perhaps conversations. And let's not forget that the systems will be justified by talking about the horrendous inner city. In actuality the vast majority of the time these systems will be used in places nowhere like that. When you read stories like this remember that these guys are selling equipment just like any other startup. You're getting their best pitch. Big cities need this stuff, so it's a good thing for them. (Although I imagine we'll just start seeing a lot of silencers). What concerns me is that 90%+ of the time there's no crime being committed, save for discharging a firearm. So there's all these thousands of "criminals" discharging firearms that haven't been arrested before but could be now. Yay? Is it always a good thing with the grip of the state tightens, as long as we can point to something good coming of it? Hopefully the cops will be so overloaded with gunshots they'll ignore the system and use it only for forensic purposes. But I doubt it. Instead I imagine we'll see these discharge numbers added to the crime reports for cities in an effort to secure more funding for even more police presence. Whether that's a good thing or not is debatable. There's obviously a real problem in Chicago and several other cities, but the rest of the country not so much.

CamperBob2 14y ago
Slippery-slope arguments come into play almost any time you use technology to solve social problems. It doesn't matter that the slippery slope is a logical fallacy, if the entities involved (i.e., people) aren't logical ones. "Libertarians" harp on this stuff because historically, the cost of letting governments do anything they want runs into the hundreds of millions of lives. A more enlightened approach would be to ask why Chicago has so much trouble with gun crime, given that many other American cities have higher per-capita rates of firearm ownership both legal and otherwise. One thing's absolutely certain: the real problem, whatever it is, will not be solved with digital signal processing.
- DanielBMarkham 14y ago
  I listened to a set of lectures from the Teaching Company a while back on the debates that occurred when the United States ratified its constitution. The opponents made all sorts of slippery-slope arguments: that there would be a standing army, that the federal government would grow past it's ability to pay (which the supporters actually acknowledged), that the Congress would become politicians for life, and so on. At the time, these guys were dismissed as being totally wacko (my words, not the lecturer's). What kind of ridiculous slippery-slope arguments were these guys making, anyway? Of course, all of these predictions did come true, it just took a long time. But when they were made it was all too easy to discount them as being far-fetched. This trend in public discourse continues to this day.
  - tptacek 14y ago
    If a founding principal of the United States was that legislators shouldn't become politicians for life, the US Constitution could have included term limits for the legislative branch. How seriously are we to take the "debates that occurred when the United States ratified the Constitution"? The opinions expressed in those debates aren't laws.
    - bugmenot 14y ago
      They did in the Senate, but that got screwed up by the 17th amendment.
  - acuozzo 14y ago
    > I listened to a set of lectures from the Teaching Company a while back on the debates that occurred when the United States ratified its constitution. I'd like to listen to these lectures. Please try to remember what they're called. Thanks!
    - CamperBob2 14y ago
      I'm guessing he's referring to a course being offered on the Federalist Papers, for what it's worth.
haberman 14y ago
Most of these slippery slope arguments are made by people who seem to have no actual experience with any of the issues at hand apart from reading 1984 and Fahrenheit 451. This gives them about as much credibility as someone whose information comes from watching Jack Bauer on 24 and Fox News. You cannot come to reasonable conclusions about issues like this without seeing what's going on in the real world. This is not a math problem we're talking about; you can't sit around thinking and extrapolating and expect your conclusions to mean anything. It's like trying to run a scientific experiment without any data. Do you know anything about criminal law? Do you know anything about the legal checks that are in place that prevent your doomsday scenario from happening? Are you aware of how evidence rules are applied in real cases? I'm sure you've read stories about the most egregious abuses, because they are the ones that pop up in the feeds that you read, but do you extrapolate from these that all cases are like this? I say all this because I recently had the very eye-opening experience of serving on a juror in a five-week criminal trial. I realized that many of the prejudices that the technorati crowd has about the justice system are totally unfounded, at least for the case that I sat on. Our jury was not a clueless bunch of simpletons, our prosecutor couldn't get whatever he wanted by just saying "think of the children," and the judge was not an apathetic overworked bureaucrat who let anything slide. What concerns me is that 90%+ of the time there's no crime being committed, save for discharging a firearm. So there's all these thousands of "criminals" discharging firearms that haven't been arrested before but could be now. Yay? Are you really arguing that discharging firearms is a victimless crime? (edit: I'm talking about dense urban areas).
- ghshephard 14y ago
  Given that I spent the better part of my childhood firing a .22 and a .306 after school at whatever I decided was worth shooting (not to mention fall season, when whatever was worth shooting usually had four legs), I would argue that discharging firearms is not a crime. And it most certainly fits _the_ definition of "victimless crime." The only parties that you are indirectly benefitting would be Walmart (or wherever you pick up your ammunition).
  - tptacek 14y ago
Cushman 14y ago
> Although I imagine we'll just start seeing a lot of silencers I wouldn't bet on this. Suppressors are highly controlled Federally, and completely illegal to own in Illinois (and Iowa and Michigan and a number of other states as well). You may think that doesn't matter to criminals, but most illegal firearms are purchased legally at some point-- not gonna happen for suppressors. And they aren't mix-and-match; you need a threaded barrel for your gun specifically. (There's a nice little scene in Goodfellas about this problem.) But let's say you get ahold of one. You've got a line with a crooked Class 3 dealer in Indiana (this is someone who is also allowed to sell machine guns and grenade launchers) and he decides he's gonna risk his life by selling to a gang banger. Fair enough. So you get home, you load up your 9mm, screw on your shiny new suppressor, and go outside to take a potshot at some asshole you got beef with. Two minutes later, a couple of squad cars show up, lights flashing. What happened? Well, you got your suppressor, but you're still using your same old bog-standard black-market ammunition. The can turns the hearing-damaging bang of your gun into a merely very loud bang, but it does nothing about the supersonic crack your bullet makes. You were quieter, but far from quiet; a ShotSpotter that was close enough easily picked you out. If your dealer was looking out for you, he would have mentioned this, and recommended you switch to a subsonic ammunition. If he was really looking out for you, he'd also mention that this ammunition has significantly reduced range and stopping power, and probably does not have enough operating pressure to reliably cycle your automatic-- meaning you need to cock your gun every other shot like Jack Bauer. Sounds pretty much ideal for your inner-city gang fight, right? And lest we forget, when the fuzz finally catches up to you, whether with the ShotSpotter or with good-old-fashioned police work, you are not going to get slapped with possession and sent upstate. As soon as that suppressor gets entered into evidence, with its nicely filed-down serial number, they're going to make a phone call, and the ATF is going to come to town with some serious Federal prosecution heat. They will hang you up by your toes until you tell them who sold the thing to you, and then they will find that person and make them severely wish that they had not. So... yeah. Don't bet on it.
- njharman 14y ago
  Suppresors are not hard to make. Due to selection pressures (jail/death) criminals in the aggregate are crafty. They will figure it out.
plainOldText 14y ago
I think you're being unfair. The statement could have come from anyone. Moreover, in the article it is not associated with any particular group. Why do you have to point at libertarians, or any other group for that matter?

CamperBob2 14y ago

Slippery-slope arguments come into play almost any time you use technology to solve social problems. It doesn't matter that the slippery slope is a logical fallacy, if the entities involved (i.e., people) aren't logical ones. "Libertarians" harp on this stuff because historically, the cost of letting governments do anything they want runs into the hundreds of millions of lives. A more enlightened approach would be to ask why Chicago has so much trouble with gun crime, given that many other American cities have higher per-capita rates of firearm ownership both legal and otherwise. One thing's absolutely certain: the real problem, whatever it is, will not be solved with digital signal processing.

DanielBMarkham 14y ago
I listened to a set of lectures from the Teaching Company a while back on the debates that occurred when the United States ratified its constitution. The opponents made all sorts of slippery-slope arguments: that there would be a standing army, that the federal government would grow past it's ability to pay (which the supporters actually acknowledged), that the Congress would become politicians for life, and so on. At the time, these guys were dismissed as being totally wacko (my words, not the lecturer's). What kind of ridiculous slippery-slope arguments were these guys making, anyway? Of course, all of these predictions did come true, it just took a long time. But when they were made it was all too easy to discount them as being far-fetched. This trend in public discourse continues to this day.
- tptacek 14y ago
  If a founding principal of the United States was that legislators shouldn't become politicians for life, the US Constitution could have included term limits for the legislative branch. How seriously are we to take the "debates that occurred when the United States ratified the Constitution"? The opinions expressed in those debates aren't laws.
  - bugmenot 14y ago
    They did in the Senate, but that got screwed up by the 17th amendment.
- acuozzo 14y ago
  > I listened to a set of lectures from the Teaching Company a while back on the debates that occurred when the United States ratified its constitution. I'd like to listen to these lectures. Please try to remember what they're called. Thanks!
  - CamperBob2 14y ago
    I'm guessing he's referring to a course being offered on the Federalist Papers, for what it's worth.

haberman 14y ago

Most of these slippery slope arguments are made by people who seem to have no actual experience with any of the issues at hand apart from reading 1984 and Fahrenheit 451. This gives them about as much credibility as someone whose information comes from watching Jack Bauer on 24 and Fox News. You cannot come to reasonable conclusions about issues like this without seeing what's going on in the real world. This is not a math problem we're talking about; you can't sit around thinking and extrapolating and expect your conclusions to mean anything. It's like trying to run a scientific experiment without any data. Do you know anything about criminal law? Do you know anything about the legal checks that are in place that prevent your doomsday scenario from happening? Are you aware of how evidence rules are applied in real cases? I'm sure you've read stories about the most egregious abuses, because they are the ones that pop up in the feeds that you read, but do you extrapolate from these that all cases are like this? I say all this because I recently had the very eye-opening experience of serving on a juror in a five-week criminal trial. I realized that many of the prejudices that the technorati crowd has about the justice system are totally unfounded, at least for the case that I sat on. Our jury was not a clueless bunch of simpletons, our prosecutor couldn't get whatever he wanted by just saying "think of the children," and the judge was not an apathetic overworked bureaucrat who let anything slide. What concerns me is that 90%+ of the time there's no crime being committed, save for discharging a firearm. So there's all these thousands of "criminals" discharging firearms that haven't been arrested before but could be now. Yay? Are you really arguing that discharging firearms is a victimless crime? (edit: I'm talking about dense urban areas).

ghshephard 14y ago
Given that I spent the better part of my childhood firing a .22 and a .306 after school at whatever I decided was worth shooting (not to mention fall season, when whatever was worth shooting usually had four legs), I would argue that discharging firearms is not a crime. And it most certainly fits _the_ definition of "victimless crime." The only parties that you are indirectly benefitting would be Walmart (or wherever you pick up your ammunition).
- tptacek 14y ago

Cushman 14y ago

> Although I imagine we'll just start seeing a lot of silencers I wouldn't bet on this. Suppressors are highly controlled Federally, and completely illegal to own in Illinois (and Iowa and Michigan and a number of other states as well). You may think that doesn't matter to criminals, but most illegal firearms are purchased legally at some point-- not gonna happen for suppressors. And they aren't mix-and-match; you need a threaded barrel for your gun specifically. (There's a nice little scene in Goodfellas about this problem.) But let's say you get ahold of one. You've got a line with a crooked Class 3 dealer in Indiana (this is someone who is also allowed to sell machine guns and grenade launchers) and he decides he's gonna risk his life by selling to a gang banger. Fair enough. So you get home, you load up your 9mm, screw on your shiny new suppressor, and go outside to take a potshot at some asshole you got beef with. Two minutes later, a couple of squad cars show up, lights flashing. What happened? Well, you got your suppressor, but you're still using your same old bog-standard black-market ammunition. The can turns the hearing-damaging bang of your gun into a merely very loud bang, but it does nothing about the supersonic crack your bullet makes. You were quieter, but far from quiet; a ShotSpotter that was close enough easily picked you out. If your dealer was looking out for you, he would have mentioned this, and recommended you switch to a subsonic ammunition. If he was really looking out for you, he'd also mention that this ammunition has significantly reduced range and stopping power, and probably does not have enough operating pressure to reliably cycle your automatic-- meaning you need to cock your gun every other shot like Jack Bauer. Sounds pretty much ideal for your inner-city gang fight, right? And lest we forget, when the fuzz finally catches up to you, whether with the ShotSpotter or with good-old-fashioned police work, you are not going to get slapped with possession and sent upstate. As soon as that suppressor gets entered into evidence, with its nicely filed-down serial number, they're going to make a phone call, and the ATF is going to come to town with some serious Federal prosecution heat. They will hang you up by your toes until you tell them who sold the thing to you, and then they will find that person and make them severely wish that they had not. So... yeah. Don't bet on it.

njharman 14y ago
Suppresors are not hard to make. Due to selection pressures (jail/death) criminals in the aggregate are crafty. They will figure it out.

plainOldText 14y ago

I think you're being unfair. The statement could have come from anyone. Moreover, in the article it is not associated with any particular group. Why do you have to point at libertarians, or any other group for that matter?